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Today, we are seeing a far-reaching spread of practices which explore cross-species relations. This is happening both on the international and the Italian scenes: a response to a perceived imminent catastrophe, in a world where every original balance has been shaken.
At the root of the great problems of our time, there seems to be an error of the imagination, based on a anthropocentric/capital-centric paradigm which translates into man presuming the priority of his own species. Expressed in an ever-more pronounced temporal misalignment between human action and natural processes, it means ignoring the close dependence that binds our species to the animal, plant — and, today, also technological — kingdoms.
For this reason, too, artists are increasingly becoming shamans and scientists, as can clearly be seen in some recent Biennali. They do so in an artistic context which in turn becomes a tool both for metabolising the conflict between the “natural” and the “anthropic”, and, and above all, for imagining other paradigms, aimed at the survival of the Planet and, sometimes, of the species itself.
Interspecies perspectives tend, in fact, to explore a different continuity between the human world and non-human alterities. They stimulate discussion on the possibility of creating alternative links between biology and culture, physics and economics, spirituality and technology.
First of all, though, it is important to clarify what biology means by “interspecies relations”. These latter are defined as relations between organisms belonging to different species within the same ecosystem; they may be positive, but also antagonistic (as in the case of predation), neutral or mutualistic.
Today’s art seems mainly inspired by these latter, as it conceives models of interspecies symbiosis that approach the natural and anthropic worlds in an idiosyncratic manner and imagine futures that do not necessarily include man.
One example comes from the practice of Camilla Alberti (born 1994). Her Unbinding Creatures take the form of biomorphic and alien sculptures which, denying any concept of kalokagathia, accommodate within themselves a hybrid, paradoxical but once again fertile mixture of the natural and the anthropic. Starting from the concept of ruin, Alberti’s works allow us to imagine unprecedented possibilities of constructive and sustainable symbiosis, the result of recovery, contamination and collaboration.
Similarly, Lorenzo D’Alba (born 1998) encourages identification with unknown alterities by creating landscapes inhabited and inhabitable by hybrid beings, in the balance between human and non-human, in a parallel elsewhere to which man will have to adapt.
A posthuman and borderline integration of the monstrous, between the natural world and the remnants of techne, is also behind the work of Giulia Cenci (born 1988). Using disused agricultural machinery — tools already belonging to the “archaeology” technology — the artist creates disturbing hybrid installations that invade the space of civilisation, challenging all hierarchical distinctions between machines, animals, plants, bacteria and humans.
In the same vein are some of the works of Michele Gabriele (born 1983); they live on a similar chaotic and grotesque post-technological integration of organic and industrial, in which the human being already seems to assume the status of a mere residual and extinct element.
For its part, the bestiary by Luca Petti (born 1990) is decidedly dystopian. The artist imagines a Planet in which man has already been replaced by organisms which have had to readjust their forms and functions in order to survive. This is itself a result of the sophistications devised by man to remove these organisms from their natural contexts and better “adapt them” to his own consumption patterns.
We can thus see how, in these artists, the exploration of a posthuman future begins with an “aesthetics of the monstrous”. This latter is also understood as the possibility of imagining symbiotic and metamorphic solutions that are radically “other” , and as a reaction to the supposed rationality and objectivity of current scientific classifications.
In such a climax of dystopian visions, the “dysfunctioning” of a human body —which has become increasingly estranged from its natural context and ever closer to the machine — is dramatically portrayed by the artist Yuval (born 1951). In the series Foreign bodies, the tormented movements of the performers, when faced with the sublime of nature, suggest a systematic dysfunction of a machine/human body that has lost all energetic and vital connection with the surrounding world.
Sometimes, then, the posthuman continues to be imagined not so much as the “end” of the human (starting from a stance of total distrust in progress), but as a moment of more fluid redefinition, also in relation to the current possibilities of science and technology.
One example is the transmedia and trans-species practice of Agnes Questionmark (born 1995), who develops the concept of the “meta body” by investigating its possible transformations in relation to present and potential developments in genetics and biology.
Starting from the primordial element of water and inspired by the concept of Homo Aquaticus, Agnes explores a hybrid state between the not human and the more-than-human, between the monstrous and the portentous. Here, the underwater dimension set in parallel with the foetal dimension becomes the realm of fluidity par excellence, where everything begins but can still transform and evolve beyond categories of gender and species.
Ambra Castagnetti (born 1993) takes a similar approach. Her works are driven by a desire to transform our relationship with our bodies and the beings around us. By rethinking the biological and ontological boundaries of the human being, in Castagnetti the processes of metamorphosis become possibilities to break the limits and constraints of identity, suggesting a different fluidity between genders and species.
We are thus faced with the notion of a human body that is capable of fluidly changing and evolving to adapt to and survive the drastic changes which are taking place in both the environment and society.
Another approach to these issues uses science and technology to listen to the natural world and propose alternative modes of interaction, which overcome human self-referentiality.
New bio/techno-hybrid and symbiotic futures are suggested, for instance, by the kinetic/sound works of Marco Barotti. Operating at an interesting intersection between organic ecosystems and machines, Barotti’s practice foregrounds the tensions and conflicts between them by translating complex scientific data into aesthetic experiences. At the same time, he foreshadows the possibility of a technology that allows itself to “bio-inspire”. This means giving voice to nature, becoming a sounding board for its present condition, and even actively intervening in its preservation.
The works of Giovanni Chiamenti (born 1992), on the other hand, represent the full symbiosis between nature and human intervention — a balance achieved through the intervention of science. The artist imagines an almost total hybridisation of the two elements, the result of the eternal adaptation effected by the natural world in order to survive anthropic circumstances.
In his Interspecies Kin, the artist tests the possible coexistence between plastic materials, bioplastics and microorganisms. He imagines a “Plastocene” (as per Chris Skinner) of hybridisations that are in reality already taking place, as in the case of marine fungi feeding on microplastics.
As it explores cross-species themes, art also becomes fertile ground for a return to alternative models of knowledge and spirituality, traceable to a primordial or ancestral level of civilisation which has not yet been undermined by anthropocentric/capitalocentric superstructures and is therefore closer to the original balance between natural and social factors.
This translates into the retrieval of an animistic/shamanic mythopoetic imagination — as we can detect in some of the poetics mentioned above — and also into a “becoming indigenous” (Danowski, Castro) which, however, still seems to be absent in Italy.
Indeed, this authentic, perhaps more primordial urge to be conscious of “being the world” still seems partial. That is, the consciousness that we are part of a fluid system of interconnections and interdependencies that goes beyond any Darwinian, hierarchical scientific categorisation, but also beyond the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, between subject and world.
Such an approach would in fact seem to have been anticipated in Italy also by arte povera, in an attempt to “deculturalise art”, “being aimed at the conscious identification real=real, action=action, thought=thought, event=event, an art that prefers informational essentiality”.
This is something that we find today in some of the practices which we have mentioned, and as in that of Fabio Roncato (born 1980). His works are often moulded by the natural and physical processes to which the materials or contexts on which the artist intervenes are subjected.
Indeed, this holistic level of complete coexistence and integration of heterogeneous components in a single world/system passes via a full awareness of a primordial interpenetration — predating human supremacy — between processes, times, spaces and beings.
However, also in artistic practice, this compels a radical reconsideration of the today consolidated relationships between knowledge and human doing, between anthropic construction and the processes of matter. It requires a total acceptance of the limitations to which man is subject, generated by the inability of his senses to fully grasp and understand the natural forces that govern the Universe.
In most of the practices mentioned, however, the primacy of the human geniusseems to persist, as well as an epistemological, ecological and cosmological system which has only partially been revised with respect to that today proposed by artists from indigenous communities.
It remains to be proven over time what kind of level of interspecies collaboration, synchrony and entropy — human-driven or otherwise — will be required by the coming evolution not only of species, but of the planet itself, to save us through a more equitable distribution of energy, resources and space.
